Double Down: Game Change 2012 (31 page)

Packing into Drumthwacket’s formal dining room were a couple dozen of Christie’s associates; Romney brought with him Johnson and Spencer Zwick. The case Mitt made over the meal was forceful and direct. His 2008 bid had taught him invaluable lessons; he wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. He would run an all-economy-all-the-time campaign, hammering Obama for his fecklessness and failures. Only he had the business background and sagacity to fix the mess that the country was in. Only he would
have a fund-raising operation capable of matching the president’s. He was far and away the party’s likeliest standard-bearer and best chance to reclaim the White House.

Romney was even more aggressive after dinner, when he and Christie repaired to the library for a private talk. I am going to be the nominee, Mitt declared. You should get on board now, before anybody else. The earlier you give your endorsement, the more it will mean.

Christie told Romney he wasn’t going to back anyone in the near future. It’s too soon, he said, I’m not ready. (What Christie thought was less diplomatic:
This guy will be delighted with my endorsement whenever I decide to make it.
) He also told Romney something else—that until Christie made up his mind, he wanted none of the candidates, including Mitt, to raise money in New Jersey.

Romney found the stipulation galling, and voiced his displeasure. As Christie dug in his heels, the atmosphere got tense. Look, Christie said, when I decide to support someone, it will be more powerful if I bring everyone along with me. Just be patient; it’ll be fine. But let’s be clear: if you jump the gun and start raising money here, you can almost certainly kiss my support good-bye.

Romney left Drumthwacket incredulous at Christie’s diktat and the backroom delivery—it was like something out of
The Sopranos. Are you kidding me?
Mitt thought.
He’s going to do that?

Up in Boston, Stevens was equally astonished at Christie’s imperiousness. There were plenty of New Jersey donors who’d given money to Mitt in 2008; now Chris was trying to impose a gag order on talking to them? “He sounds like the biggest asshole in the world,” Stuart griped to his partner, Russ, about their mid-Atlantic client.

Rhoades was no more pleased with the prohibition, but he counseled prudence. The earlier we get Christie, the better—but better late than not at all, he said. When members of Zwick’s finance team complained about being blocked from pockets of ready Garden State cash, Rhoades always offered the same verbal slap upside the head: Shut the fuck up. Don’t go into Jersey. We have plenty of time.

But as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, with no Christie endorsement in sight, doubts crept in on Commercial Street.
Although the governor continued to issue denials of any 2012 ambitions, his comments were increasingly freighted with self-regard. In late June, he appeared on
Meet the Press,
where David Gregory asked him who in the current field might garner his support.

“Any one of them could if they’re willing to be authentic,” Christie said. “That’s what allows you to do the big things like we’re doing in New Jersey. It’s not that I’m universally loved; we know I’m not in New Jersey. But what they do say in New Jersey is ‘We like him and we think he’s telling us the truth.’ I think we need to have that type of politics on the national level.”

Romney’s luck regarding would-be rivals had been miraculous so far. The later it got, the less likely it was that anyone plausible would jump in. But Mitt worried that Christie might be an exception. The establishment loved him. The Tea Party adored him. The punditocracy pined for him. And then there were the blandishments of the billionaires’ club—which even politicians with smaller egos than Big Boy’s would find difficult to ignore.

•   •   •

O
N THE SAME JUNE
Sunday that Christie made his latest turn on
Meet the Press,
three hundred of the fantastically rich and colossally conservative were waiting for him in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The plutocrats were gathered at the Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch, for a secret retreat hosted by the Koch brothers. Christie was jetting in from Washington to deliver the coveted dinnertime keynote.

That afternoon, the attendees heard from Perry, who at that point was still weighing whether to enter the race and had managed to wangle a speaking slot. The billionaires and millionaires were curious about this character who was ginning up so much chatter. But by the end of the speech, the air had gone out of the room. Instead of laying out a vision for the nation, Perry boasted ceaselessly about Texas. Raising five fingers, he declared that he had a four-point plan to solve something or other; after ticking off its planks, he was left with one digit extended awkwardly in the air. In the back of the room, one of the Kochs’ political advisers thought,
If this dude runs, he’ll be done after the second debate.

The contrast with Christie could not have been more striking. After being introduced lavishly by David Koch—who called him a “true political
hero,” professed to being “inspired by this man,” and declared him to be “my kind of guy”—Christie spoke for nearly an hour and had the crowd in the palm of his hand. He regaled the group with tales of his battles with the unions. In the Q&A, he drew laughs with references to MTV’s
Jersey Shore
and some sly mockery of the Lone Star State (and, by implication, its governor): “We all love Texas, okay? The greatest place in the world, it’s wonderful, it’s fabulous, it’s amazing. We all love Texas. Great. So we dispense with that first.”

The Koch retreat was Christie’s first stop on a summer tour of mogul-fests. Two weeks later, he was in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual Allen & Company media-and-technology conference. Interviewed onstage by Tom Brokaw, Christie blew the room away again, eliciting kudos not just from Republicans but from Democrats, independents, and the studiously apolitical members of the info-royalty.

One sovereign in particular left Sun Valley burbling about Big Boy: Rupert Murdoch. Still sour on Romney and un-enamored of the rest of the field, News Corp’s chairman returned to New York determined to draw Christie into the race. He’s energetic, sure-footed, and electable, Murdoch gushed to a confidant of many years—who had never seen the old man with such a crush on a candidate. Murdoch knew that Roger Ailes had been urging Christie to run for months and had gotten nowhere. But Rupert also knew someone who seemed to be making more progress.

That someone was Ken Langone, who had appointed himself as the unofficial chief of the Draft Christie conspiracy. Seventy-five years old, Langone, the son of a plumber, had bootstrapped himself to the top of a financial empire, playing in venture capital and investment banking. Blustery and impatient, with a quick temper and a gutter mouth, he was conservative but idiosyncratically so. In 1992, he had been a key backer of Ross Perot, a close friend. In 1996, he raised dollars for Dole but ended up being happy that Clinton prevailed. In 2000 and 2004, he favored Bush, but only because he saw Gore and Kerry as so much worse.

Although Langone had nominally supported McCain, he greeted Obama’s presidency with high hopes. Langone was passionate about education reform and chaired a charter school in Harlem. On election night in 2008, he went to bed thinking,
Isn’t this wonderful? Minority kids have a new role model—not a football player, not a rapper, but a president of the United States.
But to Langone, it was all downhill from there as Obama revealed himself to be a rank ideologue, demonizing wealth to divide the electorate to his political advantage.
If it wasn’t for us fat cats and the endowments that we fund,
Langone thought,
every university in the country would be fucked.

In contemplating who should replace Obama, Langone had latched on to Christie in 2010. He loved the governor’s clashes with the teachers’ unions, his aversion to political correctness, and his penchant for telling critics to shove it—not least when Christie caught flak from some on the right for appointing a Muslim American judge. Comparatively, Romney was a yawn. At a meeting in Langone’s office that summer, the billionaire told Mitt that he would support him, but only in the breach. “Governor, I’ll make it easy,” Langone said. “If my guy doesn’t run, as I look at what else is out there, you’re it.”

By then Langone had been cajoling Christie for months, in person and by phone, and enlisting Murdoch and others to do the same.
This is a gang bang,
Langone thought.
The more the merrier.

The apotheosis of Langone’s lobbying took place on July 19 at the Racquet and Tennis Club, on Park Avenue. The financier had invited Christie to meet with a few folks who wanted to make their case to him directly about why he should run—a full-scale rollout of the Draft Christie brigade in all its moneyed glory. Druckenmiller, Schwab, Schwarzman, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, and former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso were in the house (with a combined net worth of more than $20 billion). Patched in via speakerphone were Singer, Jones, David Koch, Carl Icahn, former GE chairman Jack Welch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack.

When Christie arrived with his wife, Mary Pat, seventeen-year-old son Andrew, and DuHaime, they were startled and staggered by the firepower on display. Christie told the group he was there to listen. They had a great deal to say. Langone pledged that everyone in the room would be behind him, and that money would be no object. Druckenmiller and others argued that the fate of the American economy rested on Christie’s shoulders.

But perhaps the most powerful plea came from a non-billionaire who was also present. Henry Kissinger had been taken with Christie since they
first met at a Yankees game a year earlier. The foreign policy éminence grise had then invited the governor to dinner. Rising now with the aid of his cane, Kissinger said, “If you ask me whether Governor Christie knows anything about foreign policy, I’d have to say he doesn’t know anything about foreign policy. But if you ask me whether he should run, I think we need a candidate with character and courage—and I think he’s got both.”

Christie was rarely at a loss for words, but this silenced him. Listen, he said finally, I don’t want to mislead you. The overwhelming likelihood is that I won’t do this. But I can’t tell you I’m not moved by what I have heard just now. And after everything you all have said, I can’t walk out of here and not at least consider this thing. So Mary Pat and I are going to take some time and figure out what we think.

No one in the room was deluded enough to believe that Christie had undergone a conversion, or foolish enough to dismiss his reticence. But few doubted that, for the first time, he had left the door ajar—which was enough for Langone to leave the meeting thinking,
Mission accomplished.

•   •   •

W
ORD OF THE CHRISTIE-LANGONE
powwow leaked to Politico almost immediately. The governor was asked about it at a press conference in Trenton later that afternoon. “There are some people who believe that I should leave this job and go for another one,” Christie said. “I’m always willing to sit and listen to folks who want to make that argument to me, but I said nothing different to [Langone and Co.] today than I’ve said to other folks in the past.”

Disingenuous though it was, Christie’s public posture wouldn’t waver for the next ten weeks: Nothing has changed, I’m not considering a run, and please get off my back. But behind the scenes, the period was fraught and frantic with deliberations, to-ing and fro-ing, and solicitations of advice.

Mary Pat Christie’s main focus was the impact on her four children, all under age eighteen, but she also had less motherly concerns. An investment banker at Cantor Fitzgerald, she was politically astute and protective of her husband’s public image and long-range potential. She feared that if he ran and failed to win the nomination, the setback would imperil his reelection as governor—and thus his future on the national stage. Embedded
professionally in the financial sector, she had savvy questions about the fund-raising hurdles Chris would have to surmount. New Jersey had “pay-to-play” restrictions limiting the contributions he could collect from Wall Street, which had handicapped him in his war with Corzine. What effect would those rules have on a national bid? Were Langone and his crew really good for the astronomical sums they were promising?

The governor had a lot of questions, too. In getting a handle on the logistics and mechanics of a late entry—the filing deadlines, debates, prospective travel schedules—he could rely on DuHaime and Palatucci. Christie’s sharpies were receiving oodles of unsolicited intel from party bigwigs, name-brand strategists, and early-state operatives. They also had presidential experience of their own: Palatucci with Bush 41 in 1992, and DuHaime with Bush 43 in 2004 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

But Christie’s consultations extended far beyond his immediate orbit. He talked to Barbour, Kasich, and Giuliani, all of whom pledged their support. He talked to Paul Ryan, who was himself receiving presidential entreaties from members of the billionaires’ club. He talked to Ken Mehlman, manager of Bush’s 2004 operation and later chair of the RNC, who told him his pugnacity and reform-mindedness were ideally suited to the political moment. And he talked to the fellow Mehlman had helped steer to reelection: calling from Kennebunkport one August day, Dubya jawed with Christie for forty-five minutes, playing sounding board as the governor ran through the pluses and minuses of a run.

Mary Pat’s phone rang at her desk at Cantor Fitzgerald some days later. Barbara Bush was on the line, offering encouraging words detailing the kid-friendliness of White House life. After hard-edged conversations about buck-raking and consultations with Mehlman (independent of Chris) regarding the prospects for a race, Mary Pat found chatting with the GOP’s First Grandma a breath of soothing fresh air.

Rare was the colloquy of any consequence in Bushworld that didn’t get back to Rove. And rare was the day he didn’t receive at least one call from a palpitating Langone. On August 15, Rove turned up on
Hannity
and touted—teasingly, tantalizingly—what he knew to be true about the altered state of Christie’s disposition.